What is a DPU and why does it matter? DPU vs SmartNIC 

We're glad to hear it was useful. We'll be releasing an introductory video to networks and another one of switches in a few weeks so it'll be interesting to hear what you think of them. - JG

Thanks for the feedback. We'll definitely follow up with more videos on DPUs as the technology and market develops, it seems that almost every week a new DPU is being announced. In the meantime, we hope this helps with your questions: A. The DPU market is developing very rapidly at the moment, a good place to start would be an NVIDIA BlueField 2 DPU, due in part to the price and availability but also critically because as you'll see from the answers to your other questions below NVIDIA provides lots of software and training assets to support its hardware products. You can find out more here: www.scan.co.uk/business/nvidia-bluefield-data-it B. DOCA is the NVIDIA SDK for doing all the Bluefield DPU development based on DPDK. You can find out more here: www.dpdk.org/ doc.dpdk.org/guides/gpus/cuda.html developer.nvidia.com/networking/doca C. NVIDIA provides a free online DLI course on DPU programming: courses.nvidia.com/courses/course-v1:DLI+S-NP-01+V1/ D. Here are a variety of cybersecurity use cases using NVIDIA DPUs and its Morpheus platform: developer.nvidia.com/morpheus-cybersecurity blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/07/12/palo-alto-networks-cyber-defenses/ developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-introduces-bluefield-dpu-as-a-platform-for-zero-trust-security-with-doca-1-2/ blog.checkpoint.com/2020/10/05/check-point-software-and-nvidia-partner-to-secure-the-datacenter-with-infinity-next/ blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/09/29/vmware-bluefield2-dpus/ Good luck with your DPU learning. - JG

@@scanitsolutions Thanks a lot for this information. This is really helpful.

for the original poster. look into fpga's. xilinx has a few models with hard logic for data processing, good place to start

E. What is the recommended amount of DPUs do I need for my Minecraft server?

Glad you like them! - JG

Thanks for the feedback. It's quite likely that DPUs will replace many NICs in the datacentre over the next few years, but not all workloads require the added management features and performance. Where NICs and SmartNICs will stay around is in the lower network speeds (around 10GbE or so) typically used by SME servers and workstations. - JG

That's a good question, although CPUs continue to add more cores and features every generation, there's no doubt that dedicated hardware, be it a DPU or a GPU, is almost always faster and more efficient. DPUs are specifically designed to offload network processes from the CPU so for some servers that might mean you can get away with speccing lower-cost CPUs; viewed another way you could keep using high-core count CPUs as all those cores are now free to run more VMs / applications. JG